Photo Narrative
“Seventeen Seconds”
featuring Model: Titus Abad
all Photographs by Michelle Gemma
Eolia Mansion at Harkness Park, Waterford, CT USA
Photo Captions from the album “Seventeen Seconds” by the Cure (1980) Fiction Records
I picked up this album in 1992 at the Heathrow Airport in London on a trip with my friend Matthew Hannan, on our way back from a visit to Megen Cox in Scotland.
An important trip as I brought a camera along and shot my very first roll of film, almost completely damaged by the airport x-ray. But the remaining frames, developed with assistance by Matthew Mclaughlin at the first Greenman Collective at Alice Court in Pawcatuck, Connecticut, led to the cover shot for Green, the Red Beard, a book of poems by Hannan, on Hozomeen Press. Full Circle, here we are, together again at PortFire.

“The fog was where I wanted to be.”“Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here.”“Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead.”“I didn’t meet a soul.”“Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is.”“That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself.”“Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land.”“The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea.”“As if I had drowned long ago.”“As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.”

The woman is perfected.Her deadBody wears the smile of accomplishment,The illusion of a Greek necessityFlows in the scrolls of her toga,Her bareFeet seem to be saying:We have come so far, it is over.Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,One at each littlePitcher of milk, now empty.She has foldedThem back into her body as petalsOf a rose close when the gardenStiffens and odors bleedFrom the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.The moon has nothing to be sad about,Staring from her hood of bone.She is used to this sort of thing.Her blacks crackle and drag.

“hey, teacher, teachertell me how do you respond to students?and refresh the page and restart the memory?respark the soul and rebuild the energy?we stopped the ignorance, we killed the enemiessorry for the night demons still visit methe plan was to drink until the pain overbut what’s worse, the pain or the hangover?”

Don’t care where we goI don’t care what we doI don’t care pretty babyJust take me with u

featuring Model: Morgan Vail—from the ongoing series “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl”—
a timeline of photographs over 17 years with the same model
June 2015
Mystic, CT USA‪Photograph by Michelle Gemma